HMSS: The Void

Well, in playing around with what I might be able to accomplish in Defold, I figured I'd start with a semi-known formula, and make a sort of "Choplifter" or "Airlift Rescue" type of game (for those old enough to know what those are...). A bunch of years ago I started a little music project with a few co-workers called "Her Majesty's Space Ship" (or HMSS for short), which was folky/bluesy/sometimes surfy music about a 10 year space war. Since it already had a fairly fleshed-out lore and characters, I figured it would be a fun place to start thematically for this game.

At the moment I have basic mechanics for the main player ship, with weapon damage (both enemy- and friendly-fire included) for the ship and all actors (currently just infantry). Friendly people (civilian and military) can also be loaded and unloaded into the rear of the ship to be transported to/from safe locations to fulfill various mission objectives.

I'll hopefully update this topic as I make progress.

Please keep in mind that I am neither a programmer, an artist, nor a designer. IF the game starts to come together into something fun and playable, I have a real artist standing by to replace my "developer (used loosely) art (used very loosely)" with some much nicer stuff. Here's a little GIF. This is zoomed in to about 1/4 or so of the full screen area. Little people heavily inspired by original C&C...

I've been spending the weekend learning about "steering behaviors" and managed to implement a basic "seek & fade" type behavior to enemy spaceships, where they attempt to track the player while not getting too close, while also using an "avoid" type behavior to stay out of each others' way. The game is starting to turn into something playable at this point!

Oof. I'm still a little ways away from a playable demo. With not a whole lot of time to dedicate to it, and learning pretty much everything as I go, the first submission will likely be in the final hour of the jam.

I've taken a little break from programming over the last few days to work on some music for it, so that's been refreshing, but the core gameplay still needs work (and a lottttttt of balance). For the moment control of the ship is pretty much where I want it, very basic AI for enemy ships, the enemy ground units are just moving left to right attacking everything, not exactly what I want. You can pick up friendly civilians and infantry and drop them off at the base, but there's no official "win condition" yet, as this will be different for each mission.

Anyway, I'm learning a TON about lua and defold, and programming in general, and it's been a lot of fun so far!

I know this is a bad idea, but I'm still on a break from scripting/debugging the main gameplay. Got a little bit of music done, and am easing my way back into the heavy coding by working on various menus, text/story, level loading, file save/load and other more "maintenancey" aspects of the game. I have to say, it's really rewarding to see not only the gameplay coming together, but sort of the "whole package" what with the menus and such. It's starting to feel positively Game-like...

Well......I uploaded something. Haha. It's an incomplete level where you either win (save all 24 civilians) or die. There's no game over screen or restart, unfortunately. It was a "skin-of-my-teeth" thing to even get this much done by the deadline. I'll be continuing to work on this in the future, refining every single thing about it, fleshing out the story and adding many missions. For now the story is literally "save the 24 civilians" :( even though I have a full 3 parts x 3 missions already planned out, and have scripted a pretty neat "talking heads" GUI for updating mission objectives throughout the mission. *sigh*